visual arts reviews
fisun.guner
'They Teach us Nothing': The Chapman children gather round an artwork

It begins in a so-so fashion. The ground-floor gallery at White Cube’s Mason’s Yard features a sea of Constructivist sculptures on plinths. These are made from bits of torn cardboard and loo rolls, sloppily painted. Jake and Dinos Chapman love corny art jokes, but this gag feels like it’s already a little flat. And I’m disappointed to be disappointed. Chapman exhibitions are always something to look forward to, and I was looking forward to this one, especially since they had in mind a game. And the game in this instance was that they had worked independently for the first time - in separate studios and unseen by the other - and you’d have to guess who’d done what.

Sarah Kent

In the days before there were any paparazzi to catch celebrities unawares, the pictures of the stars that reached mere mortals like ourselves were carefully staged by the film studios. Establishments like MGM, Warner Bros and Paramount Pictures employed stills photographers to produce atmospheric shots of the action as it unfolded on the set and to make studio portraits of individual actors for release to adoring fans.

fisun.guner
James Fox: Ludicrous assertions about British Art

Does James Fox fancy himself as the Niall Ferguson of art history? I ask because clearly this latest addition to the growing pantheon of television art historians wants to do for British art what Ferguson sought to do for the British Empire. He wants us to stop apologising, and to admit that we’re simply the best, better than all the rest. And though I grant you he is similarly photogenic (with a touch of that swarthy, swaggering arrogance, too) the ratio of plausible statement to incredulity (my own, whilst spluttering and tweeting my incredulity) was considerably weighted towards the latter.

Marina Vaizey
Andrea Mantegna’s 'Virgin and Child with the Magdalen and Saint John the Baptist'

Down the stairs the visitor enters a sequence of galleries gleaming with gold, seemingly illuminated by softly filtered evening light and flickering candles: here be a treasure house of stories in paint: saints, sinners and the narrative of the divine made flesh, from the Annunciation to the crucifixion.  Some 40 Italian altarpieces, from the 13th through to the 15th centuries – some whole but most just fragments – are theatrically displayed to suggest the atmosphere of late medieval and early Renaissance Italian churches, monasteries and convents.

fisun.guner
Marina Vaizey
Lightness is everything: the refurbished Georgian museum newly clad in glass

Gleaming, shimmering, full of pizzazz, glitz and unashamed bling, although of the 18th-century sort, as befits its role as the most cheerfully mixed up and glittering show of baubles in Bath, the Holburne Museum reopened in May after three years' closure. At a cost of £11.2 million the museum has been expanded, rebuilt, refurbished and renovated. Much more of the collection, newly installed after extensive conservation, is also on view than hitherto. The whole works a treat. As many visitors have turned up in the first month as normally come in a year.

Sarah Kent

At the end of my road is a shrine dedicated to a young man murdered there more than a year ago. For the first few months lighted candles, plastic flowers, cards and poems penned by friends and relatives were left on a doorstep; now, though, a blue plaque commemorating his short life has appeared on the wall above a constantly burning flame. Over the years the messages have also changed from outpourings of sorrow to words of adulation; the lad, who by all accounts was a drug-dealing ne’er-do-well, has been elevated to the realm of sainthood by grieving parents determined to keep the flame of remembrance burning.

fisun.guner
Twombly's 'Hero and Leandro (After Christopher Marlowe)' takes as its theme the classical legend of the doomed lovers

Some years ago the Dulwich Picture Gallery invited Howard Hodgkin to exhibit alongside the Old Masters in their collection. I am not a fan of this vastly overrated artist, but even a diehard enthusiast must have found the juxtaposition cruel. How could Hodgkin’s crudely daubed, splishy-sploshy canvases (I exempt from the description a few works painted at the highpoint of his career in the mid-Seventies) bear scrutiny against works by Rubens or Rembrandt? They couldn’t, and the exhibition was a car crash. So how will an artist whose works appear similarly unrestrained and unstructured fare in his “conversation” with just one formidable Old Master?

Marina Vaizey

A subtly haunting and brilliantly composed photograph by André Kertész lives on as a wistfully memorable image of exile: in Lost Cloud, 1937, a small, isolated cloud drifts we know not where next to a New York skyscraper. Kertész is one of the quintet of Hungarian Jewish photographers who are acknowledged as among the greatest of the last century. Kertész, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Robert Capa, Martin Munkácsi and Brassaï are the most familiar among the staggeringly accomplished Hungarian photographers who feature in the Royal Academy’s exhibition Eyewitness.

josh.spero

Fake or Fortune? on BBC One, with Fiona Bruce and art dealer and sleuth Philip Mould, ought to have been called CSI: Cork Street for its blend of fine art and forensic science. They were trying to resolve whether a Monet was in fact a Monet, using a 240 million-pixel camera, Monet's own accountbook (which Fiona Bruce ran her ungloved fingers across) and plenty of ominous music. Next up: who killed Marat in David's picture?